Tag: education

3 Thoughts on Scholarship in an AI-driven Age

One of the important issues to be addressed in recent (AI-driven) times is: how can research scholars acquire knowledge and simultaneously contribute to and communicate with society? Related to this question is: What is the role of scholarship in contemporary times?

Below are three thoughts that I wrote mainly with young researchers in mind. I am hoping that it may find use even among others.

1) Pursuit and utility of knowledge is the primary task of a scholar, and managing the perception of that knowledge is secondary. This means a scholar should use a majority of their time, resources and energy in enhancing scholarly knowledge, and in cases where there is utility, applying that knowledge in the outside ‘noisy’ world. This is your personal knowledge based on your efforts and experiences, and cannot be replaced instantaneously. This also brings uniqueness. Once you have this, you can venture into creating a realistic perception of your knowledge. Remember that learning and researching, to a large extent, are under your control; whereas how the outside world perceives your knowledge is not. Therefore, it would be prudent to pay more attention to learning and doing rather than creating a perception. Note that I am not saying that perception is unimportant. All I am saying is that perception is secondary in importance.

2) One of the key learnings in research and education is that the world is always open to good knowledge and ideas, be it in academia or industry. People are always interested in interacting with and hiring people with a sound knowledge base. It may take a while for somebody to discover your knowledge, but if you have a strong foundation and then go out to the world and interact with it, it is very difficult for the world to ignore you. This means that, having done good work, you should be able to share that work with the outside world. This can be a research paper or an engineering prototype, or any form of science, art or talent that you have. The crucial point here is to first do the hard work and then venture into the sharing of that work.

3) In your work, do not compromise on rigor. If you are a researcher, your first commitment should be towards addressing your scholarly peers or the specialized industry and then broadening your communication. Within scholarly communication, you will have to address questions within the research community. This means you will be basing your work on a large body of knowledge and subjecting yourself to internal and external criticism. This is where rigor comes in handy. Here, rigor does not mean unclear communication. It means to have thought through the questions, nuances and complications of a problem and have a broad and balanced view of the research problem. The general audience sometimes perceives rigorous scholarly communication as filled with jargon and complications. Therefore, it is always better to create two versions of your work: one for your peers and one for the general audience. In the age of AI, the second version is easier to create. Remember that your expertise will be vital in creating the second version for the general audience. That is where you can bring your authenticity and creativity. This can also broaden the scope of your knowledge without compromising your scholarship.

These are a few fleeting thoughts. You can criticize, edit, expand and adapt it to make your own version of it. After all, that is how knowledge moves forward 😊

C V Raman and long term thinking

A small sampling of Raman’s publication. These papers are related to light scattering and form the foundation on which he made his famous discovery. Raman wrote more than 400 research papers in his lifetime (apart from monographs, lectures and public talks). Writing such a series of papers on a particular topic can be observed throughout his career.

A note to young scholars: intellectual monuments are built this way: thought after thought, day after day, paper after paper. Never underestimate what can be achieved with consistent, honest effort.

Brillouin on Sommerfeld

“Everybody wondered (and still wonders) why the Stockholm committee systematically ignored Sommerfeld’s pioneer work in modern physics. Such an omission is actually impossible to understand.”

Leon Brillouin, in the foreword of his book WAVE PROPAGATION AND GROUP VELOCITY (1959)

Brillouin further mentions the teachers who taught him, and rates Sommerfeld among the best:

“I had the great privilege of attending, as a student, lectures given by some prominent physicists, such as H. A. Lorentz, H. Poincaré, and P. Langevin. But I was especially impressed by Sommerfeld’s mastery as a teacher.“

ShuX in IISER Pune

Yesterday evening (10th Jan 2026), Shubhanshu Shukla, the recent Indian astronaut, was at IISER Pune as part of the ‘India Science Festival’. There was a huge crowd gathered to see and listen to him. Within IISER, it is rare to see such a massive gathering for a science event, and it was heartening to witness this on a Saturday evening. Thanks to schools and colleges in Pune, science and science-related activities get traction from the people of Pune (especially younger people). They enthusiastically participate in many events related to science.

 Such a gathering is very important for at least three reasons:

  1. It connects a scientifically oriented person to the public and thereby connects them to science.
  2. It showcases that there is some science-related activity happening within the Indian scene.
  3. It sends out a message to people that icons can be created out of people who do science funded by the public.

I would want to emphasize four other points:

  1. Scientific icons are as good as the science they represent. A major part of the credit should go to the organizations that supported and trained him, and this includes ISRO, NASA and the Indian Air Force.
  2. To put an astronaut in space, it takes a lot of effort at various levels of society. Public support is vital for such an effort. Public icons such as Shubhanshu Shukla are a good representation of what investment in science can do to the morale of the public, especially for young people.
  3. The created momentum should not be lost, given that recognizable people, such as astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, have made an imprint on young people. This should be followed up with measures to recruit them for science and technology.
  4. Space science and technology, astronomy and astrophysics have always been among the most fascinating domains to attract people into science. Many Indian scientists and a past astronaut, Rakesh Sharma, have played an important role in this pursuit. One should not forget them.

Let me conclude with a word of appreciation for Pune city. It is not a capital city, but its enthusiasm for intellectual pursuits is high, and it attracts a lot of enterprising people (recently, there was a public policy conference that had some amazing people). If it can get a lift in its public infrastructure, it can create its own path in the landscape of science and technology.

On Criticism

How to criticize somebody’s work? This is a question we often ask in academia, especially while writing referee reports for articles in journals and theses submitted by students. It is important to learn constructive criticism of academic work, which makes criticism a tool that can lead to positive feedback. When we talk about positive feedback, it does not mean that you will have to applaud the work. It means that anybody who is receiving the feedback should be able to build on it and improve their work.

In this regard, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has come up with some thoughts on critical commentary of somebody’s work. One of the key points he notes: ‘You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way”’.

This way of changing the perspective on a piece of work is one of the crucial aspects of constructive criticism. It helps you to understand the role as a reviewer in not only correcting somebody’s mistake but also helping them to build on their own thoughts. Many times, criticism is looked down on as a negative thing. But done this way, it is probably one of the most enriching processes, not only for the person who is receiving the feedback, but also for the person who is criticizing the work. The correct way to criticize is to think with different perspectives and add to the body of knowledge that the author has already presented. In that way, knowledge is progressed and corrected for mistakes, if any.

How to Build Atomic LEGOs?

In ~8min, I try to explain how and why to build atomic Legos and their potential applications.

The video is for non-experts.

Reference for further reading:

Geim, A. K., and I. V. Grigorieva. ‘Van Der Waals Heterostructures’. Nature 499, no. 7459 (2013): 419–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12385.

Create to Understand

Below are two quotes on the blackboard of Feynman’s office in Caltech which were found just after his death.

 
The first of these quotes by Feynman is a guiding principle for anyone who wants to learn. The second quote is an idealistic one, but a good approach to becoming a ‘problem-solving’ researcher. Feynman was a master of this approach.
 
From a philosophy of science perspective, researchers can be both ‘problem creators’ and ‘problem solvers’. The latter ones are usually famous.
 
Michael Nielsen, a pioneer of quantum computing and champion of open science movement, has an essay titled: Principles of Effective Research, in which he explicitly identifies these two categories of researchers, and mentions that “they’re not really disjoint or exclusive styles of working, but rather idealizations which are useful ways of thinking about how people go about creative work.”.
 
He defines problem solvers as those “who works intensively on well-posed technical problems, often problems known (and sometimes well-known) to the entire research community in which they work.” Interesting, he connects this to sociology of researchers, and mentions that they “often attach great social cache to the level of difficulty of the problem they solve.”
 
On the other hand, problem creators, as Nielsen indicates, “ask an interesting new question, or pose an old problem in a new way, or demonstrate a simple but fruitful connection that no-one previously realized existed.”
 
He acknowledges that such bifurcation of researchers is an idealization, but a good model to “clarify our thinking about the creative process.”
 
Central to both of these processes is the problem itself, and what is a good research problem depends both on the taste of an individual and the consensus of a research community. This is one of the main reasons why researchers emphasize defining a problem so much. A counterintuitive aspect of the definition of the problem is that one does not know how good the ‘question’ is until one tries to answer and communicate it to others. This means feedback plays an important role in pursuing the problem further, and this aptly circles back to Feynman’s quote: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Raman essay and Open-Access

I see that the essay I wrote on CV Raman and made open access (thanks to Resonance, which published it) has been used by several educators on YouTube, including some in Indian languages. Also, the Google AI overview shows the published essay as the main reference for a search related to Raman’s science communication (see slideshow below).

I am glad to see that making one’s writing open to all has positive effects. Open-access, not just for readers, but also for authors, is beneficial. Especially in India, paywalls for science are a detriment.

My worry is that open-access publishing has been mainly driven by commercial publishers that extract huge funds from the publishing authors. This defeats the purpose of open science, especially when the research of an author is publicly funded. Added to that, Indian researchers and writers cannot afford to pay huge sums for publishing articles and books.

The publication landscape (including journals and books) across the world needs an introspection. Open-access model is effective only when the readers and authors have access to that model. Otherwise, the model becomes a paywall for authors.